Pete Claydon, co-founder and COO of picoChip, is to leave the
company at the end of the year. To long-time picoChip staffers:
'Pete is the soul of picoChip'.
A picoChip spokesman said: "I get the impression it's a
reasonably amicable thing. He's keeping his shareholdings and he's
keeping the connection."
Staff at picoChip were e-mailed about the move this morning.
Claydon founded picoChip with Doug Pulley in the Belvedere pub
in Bath nine years ago. It has attracted $90m worth of venture
capital, and has achieved a leading position in Wimax and femtocell
ICs.
Claydon invented the company's multi-core processing technology
and personally interviewed the company's first fifty employees.
He's done every job in the company including cleaning the
toilets.
Asked what he looked for in an interviewee he once replied: "You
know when you meet someone whether they can do something well,
whatever it may be."
Asked how he invented the company's technology he replied: "In
our case our architecture was very accidental. When I joined
Brooktree I was the 12th employee and the first who hadn't come
from Inmos, and people solved problems in this Inmos-y type of way.
They thought parallel processing was the way to do it."
"I know about simple processors, and I know there's no chance of
my designing a complicated processor, so clearly the only way to
get performance was to design a lot of simple processors."
He looked into the physics of what would be the optimal number
of transistors per processor for performance efficiency and decided
that 1m was optimal.
"The emphasis was on doing something elegant, a clean, clever
architecture which was really easy to programme. We've solved that
problem of how to programme it. We have a single programming
environment."
"The architecture is applicable to any DSP problem, it can
address any DSP problem. Now it's addressing wireless, but our
aspiration is to move into other DSP market segments."
Asked about his motivation in starting picoChip, he said: "I
don't want money, but I want commercial success because that's how
an engineer measures success. I tell the VCs I want money, because
that's what they want to hear, but it's not money, it's the success
of the company in commercial terms that I want."
With picoChip expected to IPO next year, it will be a
disappointment to Claydon not to have guided the company all the
way from start-up to flotation.
But by now, Claydon is a major world figure in the fast-growing
Wimax and femto-cell sectors and, no doubt, he'll find plenty of
interesting things to do.
In February this year, Nigel Toon, a co-founder of Icera
Semiconductor, left Icera to become CEO of picoChip.